Opera Web Browser

Opera is a web browser that currently takes up only about 2% of the browser market share.  Of course, there are more than a billion people are connected to the World Wide Web….so I really shouldn’t say only.  Their two percent touches a lot more people than anything that I work on during my day.  Unfortunately for Opera, the most recent statistics that I found had them headed in the wrong direction.   According to Market Share, IE has actually dropped more than 6.5% of their market share in the past year.  While Firefox, Safari and Chrome have all snagged some of that up, Opera has seen a bit of decline losing 0.1% of their share in the same time period.

It does appear that they have some handy features.   Although, I must admit, I am not a person who typically utilizes all of my browsers tools.  In fact, my company just updated my IE browser and I recently started using Google Chrome on occasion, and I think I am going to go nuts.  Every time I go to find something, one of my favorites, something I looked up five minutes ago, or even a simple search, I fumble through each of them and it takes twice as long as it used to.  Maybe it is just that I updated too many things at once – new phone (without all my contacts!), new apps galore, two new browsers, even my kitchen cabinet contents that have been rearranged…..so I am surrounded by things that are familiar and completely out of my normal order.  With change overload, I am not learning any one of them….I am just further confusing them.

But I digress…

Opera has some features that peak my interest.  As I frequently find myself cursed with a slow internet connection, I am intrigued by the Turbo feature they are touting in which their compression somehow boosts your speed during slow connections.  They also have an alternative to the tabs at the top of the browser for different pages that bares resemblance to the way you can flip through albums on your iPod.  Finally, I find their mouse gesture interpretation completely entertaining.  You can right click and slide your mouse slightly to the left and you can go back a page or right click and move down and to the left to minimize the window.  There are an assortment of subtle moves that can completely change what is happening on your screen and now doubt completely confuse anyone looking over your shoulder. 

I can’t help but wonder what great features my current browsers have that I know nothing about.   If I triple click my mouse, will it make me a sandwich?  Or possibly fill up my gas tank?  That would definitely be worth the time of reading the tutorial.